Committee zaps Nickels’ power bill plan

A Seattle City Council committee voted Monday to grant electricity customers substantially larger power rate reductions than Mayor Greg Nickels had proposed for 2007 and 2008.

Nickels and Seattle City Light had proposed overall reductions of 4.8 percent for those two years, starting in January. That would amount to a decrease of 2.2 percent for residential customers – or about $15 a year for the average rate payer. Commercial customers would save between nearly 2 percent and 14 percent.

The Council’s Energy & Technology committee expects its tinkering will double customers’ overall savings. It’s not yet clear how much would go to residential customers and how much would go to commerical customers.

Even though the public utility has more than $200 million in cash, City Light and Nickels’ office argued its proposal was much as the city could prudently afford. The city desperately needed to ramp up long-delayed maintenance work, such as tree trimming. Delays have doubled the duration of city light outages in recent years, officials said.

But the committee scaled back such investments a bit, saying rate payers who stomached 58 percent increases several years ago deserve a bigger cut of the largess.

The full council is expected to consider the proposal in late November.